With the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, it's always a good idea to verify whether a claimed correction has truly taken effect.
In the case of the wire service's claim, relayed by Paige Lavender at the Huffington Post, that Aaron Alexis used an AR-15 in the Navy Yard murders yesterday, it hasn't really happened. Lavender's relay claiming AP's correction and containing some of its alleged text (HT Twitchy.com) was suspicious on its face:
A "corrected version of one of the stories"? Why would the AP not have linked to all of them, or to a page containing links to all of them?
Clicking on the HuffPo tweet brings up a photo window of the early portion of the corrected story, wherever it happens to be. Neither the tweet nor the photo hyperlink takes the reader to an actual AP web page containing the allegedly corrected news story.
Okay, maybe this is all just typical HuffPo clumsiness on Paige Lavender's part. But what comes next isn't.
As of 10:45 p.m. Wednesday evening, the correction claimed in the tweet was not listed on the AP's official Corrections page (saved here for future reference) at the AP's national site, even though the other corrections listed pre-date today's AR-15 correction.
Additionally, the following uncorrected story was still at the AP's national site at 10:45 p.m. this evening — seven hours after Lavender's tweet claiming a correction had taken effect (Update: still unchanged as of 7:30 a.m. ET Thursday morning):
Funny, isn't it, how all of this laxness "just so happens" to relate to the egregious misidentification of a weapon used in a mass murder at a time when the AR-15 is so heavily under, well, assault?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
